Southend as the UK's first City of Culture, in 2013? Come off it. Maybe Carlisle? A joke, surely. Or Barnsley? Pull the other one. Yet all are on the final list of bidders for the honour.This isn't to be confused with the European Capital of Culture scheme, staged by Liverpool in 2008. No British city will wear that European hat for yonks, because it's Buggins's turn for so many other EU countries. So the culture department has invented this new wheeze just for us. Fourteen cities and towns - Portsmouth and Southampton are interlinked - and even one county (Cornwall) are on the list, which will be cut to five by March, with a "winner" announced in the summer.
But Southend, Barnsley, Carlisle? Of course, Southend has its Adventure Island and a very long pier. Carlisle has a castle, a museum and nearby Hadrian's Wall. Barnsley has its coal museum and brass bands, but is better known for alumni such as Michael Parkinson, Arthur Scargill, the umpire Dickie Bird and the larky poet Ian MacMillan. Perhaps they will be on display as part of the town's bid.
So, let's be serious. The frontrunners must be Birmingham, Durham, Norwich and Chichester, although I quite like the idea of Cornwall, home, inter alia, to Tate St Ives and a great little theatre company, Kneehigh.
Birmingham, Britain's second city, is nearly always a bridesmaid, having lost out to become European Capital of Culture last time and to stage earlier Olympics and Commonwealth Games. Actually, it's got loads to offer culturally, but is unfortunately remembered for its dire Bullring (now tarted up) and the awful accent of its citizens. Give it to Brum.
Antonia Fraser's memoir, Must You Go?, about life with Harold, reminded me of my failed scoop as a cub reporter in 1975, just after the Daily Mail had run a story that the two were having an affair. On a summer's evening at the Old Vic, I spotted Pinter and Fraser together at the interval. Rushing to a phone box, I rang the Mail's news desk.
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"Come to the Old Vic and bring a photographer, where, in about an hour, Pinter and Fraser will leave the theatre. You'll have the first pictorial evidence of the two dating."
An hour on, I saw them leave, but spotted no photographer or reporter. So I rang the paper again. "Yes, we sent them, but never saw Pinter and Fraser." "To the Old Vic?" Pause from the news desk. "God, thought you said the Aldwych, not the Old Vic." Yes, Old Vic can, I guess, sound a bit like 'Oldwitch'.
In the cinema last week for The Road, I first had the misfortune to watch a 90-second trailer of unsubtle violence, with Mel Gibson uttering crass lines such as: "You'd better decide whether you're hanging on the cross or banging in the nails." What was this American cop garbage? At the end, up came the title: "Edge of Darkness, based on the BBC series." That Edge of Darkness was a truly great drama series from the mid-1980s, a thriller with a nuclear theme, written by Troy Kennedy Martin and starring Bob Peck.This so-called film follow-up, set in America, with the odious Gibson in the lead, will be in cinemas at the end of the month. I'll give it a wide berth.
If the trailer annoyed me, then so did two teenagers sitting behind me in the cinema, noisily munching sweets and chatting. I felt like telling them to shut up. But I had recently heard the result of a court case where a middle-aged woman did the very same to a teenage boy, who then followed her to a restaurant and threw bleach over her. Briefly hospitalised, she has since been treated for anxiety, while he got only 12 months' detention.
That incident, coupled with my own with those two teenagers, and another a few weeks ago where a man behind kept his feet up over the seat next to me, made me realise that cinema rage is the new road rage. Just be careful how you combat it.
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A couple of London theatres have been in touch after my item last week about Alan Rickman not giving towards the refurbishment of Wilton's Music Hall. A bit mean-spirited, they say. Yes, the actor has not coughed up for that East End venue, but he generously has for their theatres. So I wouldn't blame him if he came after me with a razor from his Demon Barber of Fleet Street.